EDU LOPEZ ARCHITECTS
Campues der Religionen
Location: Vienna, Austria.
Date: Apr 2020 - Jun 2021
Typology: Education Landscape
Size: 18.620 sqm
Status: International Competition
Client: Association of Religions.
Collaborators:
Use the shape of the buildings to establish a new axis for the campus, and improve the links between the buildings in the urban context and act as a bridge to future regions of the city
The city of religions must be something more than a series of buildings that delimit a square. We want to avoid urban environments without context which only serve for mere circulation. We need those urban spaces that we create to take a step further and be the epicenter of student and citizen social life.
We need a university campus that meets certain parameters for society, that is identified in the urban fabric and that is community in nature. A friendly environment must be an absolute priority when carrying out the project, with buildings with an identifiable formal representation and that adapt to the urban fabric both in scale and consolidation.
Exterior view
Two very marked operations are promoted to create the city of religions and its organization, which are the main DNA of the project and its maximum representation.
The first operation is to establish only two visually interconnected volumes, which frame the site and converge around the central urban space. One of the public and multifunctional volumes, where any type of public can access and another intended exclusively for education.
The second operation is the strategic position of the churches, since they will be located below ground level to create an urban and landscape environment ideal for the social relationship between students, teachers, and society in general.
The landscape is everything. We cannot create a building complex of these characteristics without socially linking it to the landscape. For this reason we have based ourselves on operation 2 to create a dynamic, fluid space with the largest admissible surface area. In this new urban landscape, numerous elements are established that are typical of sacred spaces, but which, in turn, make up the urban and landscape part of the project.
Extreme importance is given to the natural element and specifically to water. Water not only serves as elements of climatic sustainability that soften the circulatory space, but also determines the situation of each church, since the roof of each of them is flooded by these sheets of water, and even, in In some cases, they overflow through their own facades.
Atrium 1
Atrium 2
We are aware that if we create a pattern of routes for a university campus and mark them, the rest of the spaces will become unused, which is why no fixed circulatory route is established, but rather the user is left to choose. said route, depending on your time or functional needs. In short, we do not prioritize the space, precisely due to the situation of the placement of the churches below ground level. As we have said before, we do not want to give prominence to any sacred space and this has to be evident in the urban routes.
Exterior view